What Is Our Project About?
The purpose of the larger project is to analyze and assess the human rights commitments made by FIFA ahead of the 2026 World Cup matches to be held in Toronto.
Toronto will host six matches of FIFA 2026 between June 12th and July 2nd; research is urgently needed to analyze the tournament’s impact on Toronto’s children and youth, such as their rights to security, health and physical activity as declared in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989).
Why Is This Important?
The overall goal of this project is to critically and empirically examine the potential and actual impacts of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in relation to the human rights and well-being of children and youth in Toronto. We aim to understand how hosting sports mega-events (SMEs), like the FIFA World Cup, has been shown to affect the rights of children and youth in largely negative ways (Dowse, Powell and Weed, 2018), specifically children’s rights to housing, education and the principle of ensuring children’s best interests (Ludvigsen and Byrne, 2024).
